


all these miles, feet, inches

by sadlikeknives



Category: Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-04 04:46:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12763470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: It turned out that old maxim about home being where when you had to go there they had to take you in was true, even when applied to a place you'd never heard of and people you'd never met before you were summarily shipped there as an absolute last resort.Bran Cornick thinks Ben is worth saving.  It takes Ben a while to get there himself.





	all these miles, feet, inches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hydrangea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrangea/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, hydrangea!
> 
> There are content notes for this work in the end notes.

Leah Cornick was packing some files and her laptop into a case when Adam, having been let in by Samuel on his way out, knocked on the frame of the Marrok's office door. "Adam," she said with a warmer smile than he had ever seen her give her mate. "Can I get you something to drink? We have vodka." Adam blinked at that, and she said, "You're going to need it for the tale my husband is going to tell you."

"It doesn't do anything," he said.

"You know that's not true. It does something for about three seconds at a time."

"Leah," Bran said mildly.

"Right. I have packing to do."

"Going somewhere?" Adam asked, out of politeness more than anything.

"New York. The shopping, you know." He did know, albeit not personally. Leah didn't own anything that wasn't designer, and stuck out like a sore thumb in Aspen Creek. However, he'd worked something out from the past few years living next door to Aspen Creek, and getting summoned here regularly because the Marrok wanted his input or assistance, or simply because he'd decided he hadn't gotten an update on Mercy Thompson recently enough for his liking: there was always another reason for Leah's jaunts. Never on the surface, never anything that anyone would acknowledge, but it was no secret that there was something wrong between Leah and Bran Cornick, that maybe it had never been quite right. That was an obvious weakness, and it was also something that could be used. Sometimes, people underestimated her, which she usually reacted badly to, and which was never a good idea for the other party. Worse, sometimes they felt like they could voice dissent to her. That was the last bad idea most of them had.

Bran gestured for Adam to sit. Leah still hadn't quite left the office. "I need you to take on a new wolf for me."

"Okay," Adam said readily. "Is there a reason you summoned me here in person instead of telling me over the phone?"

"I'm giving you the chance to say no to this one. If you do, he'll probably be put down. So I'd like for you to hear the whole story before you decide."

"Why isn't Aspen Creek an option?"

Bran's gaze flicked to Leah for the barest instant; his face was so bland Adam couldn't read meaning into it. He very carefully did not turn around to see what Leah's face looked like, even though she scoffed, and the hair on the back of Adam's neck stood up. Leah on her own might not have been a bigger wolf than him, but Leah was never truly on her own. 

Bran said merely, "He works with computers. Charles assures me he wouldn't be able to do anything like his current work from here. Forcing a career change on top of everything else seems likely to be counterproductive." It was true, as far as it went. It just obviously wasn't the whole reason. He slid a file across the desk. "Benjamin Shaw. Last dominant and newest wolf in what was the South Bank Pack in London, which just became part of the new Thames Valley Pack...the day before yesterday, I believe. As part of the fallout from the absolute disaster South Bank had become, he's being looked at as an accessory to rape. He's volatile, and does have issues with women--" Well, that explained that look at Leah, at least. "--so allowing the police to get to the point of questioning him could make the whole thing a lot bigger problem, but right now the evidence is thin enough distance should make him not worth pursuing further."

"So you need to get him out quickly," Adam said. "Of course, I understand that." He just still didn't understand why he was _here_ , instead of having gotten a phone call telling him to make up the spare room and arrive at the airport at such and such a time.

"Here's the thing," Leah said. "He's technically guilty."

Well. That did change a few things. "Tell his Alpha to drown him," Adam said immediately, dropping the file folder he'd just picked up back on Bran's desk. "You can't expect me to bring a rapist—accessory to a rapist—into my pack. I have Jesse to consider."

"You really need to hear the whole story," Bran cautioned him again. "Obviously, if he ever offers any kind of insult to Jesse, kill him and bill the funeral, should you choose to hold one, to me. But I don't believe that will be a problem. And it's not too late for that vodka."

Adam took a deep breath, let it out slow, and asked, "So what makes you think we should let this Benjamin Shaw live?"

"Because he went out and bought a knife," Leah said from somewhere near the door.

Bran nodded and agreed, "Because he went out and bought a knife." He flicked another glance over at Leah, and she left without another word, closing the office door behind her.

Adam sat back in his chair and sighed. Clearly, from how none of the parts fit together yet, this was going to be a long story. "All right. If you would like to start from the beginning, I'll listen."

"Benjamin Shaw," Bran began, "was a complete mess long before he was a werewolf, and I really feel we should start with that..."

By the time he finished his tale, Adam was looking fairly stunned, and Bran asked him sympathetically, "Regretting turning down that vodka?"

"Little bit," Adam admitted. "So that really is what it comes down to, huh? He bought a knife."

"He bought a knife," Bran agreed. "And he waited to be able to use it. He's a nightmare walking, there's no denying it—here, he would never have been turned, not without being thrown back for at least, oh, ten years of therapy first—but when it gets right down to it..."

"We need more men like that," Adam agreed. "Not fewer. I understand why you can't bring him here."

"He and Leah would be..." Bran trailed off, and then said delicately, "It would be unkind to ask it of him. And the thing about the computers was true as well. Will you help me salvage him?"

"I'd like to talk to him first, at least."

The corners of Bran's eyes crinkled. "That's completely reasonable and easily arranged, but I'll be honest with you: from what Arthur's said, I don't think it's going to _improve_ your opinion of him any."

"Maybe not," Adam agreed, "but I'd still like to talk to him. I was in the army," he reminded Bran. "I'm hard to rattle with a bit of bad language."

"We'll see about that."

***

Ben spent his first several hours as a member of the Thames Valley Pack shut up in a room in a house somewhere in Kensington and told to wait, someone would be figuring out what to do with him shortly. He honestly wasn't sure how long it was. There wasn't a clock, and he was still in something of a state of shock for a while.

It had been, he'd learned, Terry who ultimately led to the downfall of the South Bank Pack. Beat and rape enough women, and the police tended to notice. They'd even made the connection about the boots. Queen's Wood Pack had a few men in the police force; one of them had figured it out. Terry had been marked for execution since the moment John Thackeray won his challenge fight. Ben had just hurried it along a little.

Ben didn't realize the police knew about him, too, until the door of the room he'd been stuck in swung open and Thackeray was standing there, arms crossed, next to a werewolf Ben had never seen before in his life. (Ben had thought, by then, he was pretty good at detecting crazy; later he would be amazed he hadn't been able to smell it on Arthur Madden.) "What am I going to do with you?" the most powerful werewolf in Great Britain asked, and Ben knew instinctively that he wasn't meant to answer.

"I've got half a dozen of my men who'll alibi him for the incidents," Thackeray said, looking at Ben but talking to the man next to him, "but he fits the profile and he was known to associate with Terry, and only we know that that wasn't because he wanted to. If the police start looking to him, even without the body, which my people have taken care of, they'll look at Mr. Shaw here soon enough."

That was when Ben understood, and pretty much assumed he was about to be murdered: no one would let the humans put a werewolf in a jail cell. That way lay disaster. Madden just nodded once, thoughtful, and asked Ben, "Why did you become a werewolf, Mr. Shaw?"

"Excuse me?" Ben had asked, because he wasn't stupid enough to be rude to this wolf, even if he didn't know yet he was Arthur Madden, and because the question made no sense whatsoever. For one thing, it seemed to presuppose he had done this on _purpose_.

"It's a simple enough question."

"I—they needed a hacker."

Arthur Madden closed his eyes briefly. "Dave, you're lucky you're dead," he said softly. Then he turned to Thackeray and asked, "Do you mean to keep him?"

Thackeray shrugged and said, "I don't really care." It was not, Ben discovered, entirely true, and Madden gave Ben's new Alpha an inquisitive look. "I mean, he's bottom of the pack and he murdered his second," he said defensively. "And Terry needed a murdering, don't get me wrong, but if I'm trying to create order in this new mess I've created for myself that's one hell of a wild card. And so far I haven't found anyone with anything great to say about him besides the computers bit." Well, Ben thought. It was good to know where he stood, at least.

"They're all shite people," he informed Thackeray, and the corners his mouth twitched into something like a smile for a split second.

"Well," Thackeray said, "You're not wrong there. But they're pack. Yours...and mine now, I suppose."

"We'll shuffle some of them around," Arthur Madden said. "Split up the mobbier lot. As for you, Mr. Shaw...well, we'll see. Distance would certainly solve a lot of your problems." He said 'your problems' but Ben thought he meant 'the problems that are you.' "I have to make a phone call."

"To who?" Thackeray asked.

Madden's mouth was grim as he said, "Bran Cornick."

Ben thought, very distinctly, _Oh, shit._ He'd already gotten the impression he was ill-informed for a werewolf, even a relatively new one, and once he found out that had been Arthur Madden that really cemented it, but even he knew who Bran Cornick was: The Marrok, the undisputed ruler of the werewolves of North America. Witchblood, they said, mind reader, Grendel himself. And now, it seemed, somehow Ben's fate rested with him. He was well and utterly fucked.

"Don't look like that," Madden told him, and Ben wondered what his face looked like. "He likes problem cases. Likes fancying himself a savior." Somehow, his tone made it less reassuring than it might have been.

A few hours later, he was let out of the room, but told not to leave the house. Someone gave him food, and someone else got around to telling him that had been Arthur Madden in his doorway. He was allowed access to a computer to write a letter of resignation from his job. "You're moving to America," Thackeray's second, whose name Ben had not gotten yet, though at that point he'd worked out that their acquaintance was likely to be short enough not to bother trying, told him. "You've always wanted to live in America."

The fuck he had, but he wanted to live, so he guessed he wanted to live in America. Although... "Where in America?" he asked warily.

"Hasn't been decided yet. Cornick lives in the middle of nowhere. Montana. Wyoming. Something like that. Maybe one of the Dakotas." Ben's grasp of American geography was shaky enough that he'd already lost him. "Hope it's not him. Then again, they do say his pack takes problem wolves. Now write the damned letter."

Ben wrote the damned letter, and several hours later, when someone shoved a phone in his hand and hissed, "Make a good first impression," he tried to do that, too, although he was pretty fucking sure he failed. He operated under the assumption, baked up between 'Washington' and 'Columbia Basin,' that Adam Hauptman was the Alpha in the nation's capital right up until someone handed him his travel itinerary and it went through Seattle to somewhere called Pasco. "Where the fuck is that?"

"It's where you're going," Thackeray told him.

"But where the hell is it?"

"It's called the Tri-Cities, Cornick said. It's Hauptman's territory. I thought you knew this."

"I thought I was going to fucking DC!"

Thackeray blinked at him a few times, then admitted, "Yes, I can see how that would seem reasonable. But you're not. Good luck. You're going to need it."

Ben spent his last several hours as a member of the Thames Valley Pack packing up his life, deciding what was worth dragging halfway across the globe and what could be left for the rest of the pack to pick over like vultures. Between first and last, there had not been a whole lot of hours. He didn't really know where he was going. He didn't even know the name of anyone in his new pack, except for the Alpha. Adam Hauptman had seemed like a decent person over the phone, but who the fuck even knew? Probably someone out there had thought Terry was an all right sort. But Bran Cornick had decided he was worth saving, which was more than anyone in London seemed to care—hell, Ben wasn't that sure himself—so he'd take his second chance, and all the luck he could get.

***

Adam and Bran stood for a while staring in silence at the red wolf inside the safe room as, upstairs, the pack went about what was apparently their usual Sunday breakfast routine. Eventually, Adam said, "This probably isn't what you had in mind when you sent him to me."

"Minus the part where someone stuffed a demon in a vampire, actually, I think you're doing very well with him. And of course the demon in the vampire wasn't on you. You said he volunteered. He wanted to help."

"He did."

"And he took a bullet for you last November."

"He did that, too."

"That's not nothing, Adam. This is a setback, and a grievous one, but I have hope for him yet." 

Bran was going to say something else, but a commotion broke out upstairs then, and Adam tilted his head slightly, listening, before he swore and started for the stairs just as someone opened the door at the top and called down, "Paul versus Warren, in the garage, half an hour!"

"I said _when he was well_ , Paul!" Adam called up the stairs.

"Yeah, well, he accepted!" someone Bran suspected of being Paul called back.

"Actually," someone else called, "his exact words were, 'Sure, let's get this done.' Does that count?"

Adam sighed heavily but admitted, "That counts."

"Well," Bran said, "that's certainly a bold choice." Warren Smith had just regained the ability to bear any appreciable amount of weight on his left leg (which Samuel was going to be _furious_ if he set back), and to speak, albeit in a ruin of a voice, that morning. Perhaps Paul Westbrook had never heard any illustrative tales about cornered, injured predators while growing up, Bran thought, or perhaps he had merely allowed himself to be blinded to the fact that Warren had, in a century and change, never once been in a fight where his greatest concern was anything as prosaic as _winning_. "Where is his human?"

"Left to change clothes and track down his phone charger, I think."

That made it probably as good a time as any to, as Warren had said, get this done. If that knee went again Bran wouldn't want to face Kyle Brooks any more than Samuel. "I assume my presence will be required?"

"It would be an honor," Adam told him. "But don't worry. I don't think it's going to take very long. Excuse me. I have to—deal with this situation." He took the stairs two at a time, leaving Bran alone with the wolf who was Ben Shaw.

"I know you're awake in there," he told him. The red wolf didn't acknowledge him at all, or play even one whit less dead. "For future reference, if you'd so much as twitched when everyone started making a ruckus upstairs, it would've been much more believable." Still nothing. "Very well, then. Have it your way. But for what it's worth, I think you've been doing very well thus far with what you'd been given, and I would hate to see this be the thing that drags you down. Don't let the bastard win, Mr. Shaw. He doesn't deserve to."

The wolf in the cage didn't so much as twitch, not that Bran had really expected him to, and after another moment, he headed up the stairs to see if he could finagle another helping of Darryl Zao's cooking before the challenge fight.

***

Ben didn't get a chance to properly talk to the Marrok until the third time he came to the Tri-Cities after Ben had moved there, and even then not until toward the end. The first time, Ben had been a wolf, badly injured, and half out of his mind (he had a vague memory of being told he was doing very well that he was about half sure had to have been a hallucination), and the second, Bran Cornick had appeared out of fucking nowhere, done something to Mary Jo, and left as quickly as he'd come. He'd heard later that Cornick had actually been in town to see Mercy, and Mary Jo had been a side trip before his return to Aspen Creek. Mary Jo had been pretty sour about that, instead of grateful it had put him in the right place to help her at the right time, but Mary Jo had been sour about anything even vaguely Mercy-related for a long fucking time.

Ben didn't really get that. Even when he'd been at his most suicidal, he hadn't been angry that the Marrok had done his best in that handful of hours after Mercy killed Littleton to make sure Ben would live. It had taken him a long time to be _grateful_ , sure, but at the time all he'd really thought was, _Well, of course he did._ He was the Marrok. He'd taken time out of his day when he didn't know Ben from Mercy's cat to find a place for him to go so John Thackeray and Arthur Madden wouldn't have to execute him rather than invite disaster by allowing a werewolf to be stuck in a jail cell.

The third time Bran Cornick came to the Tri-Cities, Mercy had been missing in a fairy queen's lair for nearly a month, and the entire pack was at its wits' end. Adam was barely holding together. Warren, honestly, wasn't much better. Ben didn't think he was, either. Mary Jo was blaming herself, which was a bit roundabout but, Ben thought, also completely fair. And then the Marrok swept in and for about five minutes Ben thought everything would be all right now, because he was the fucking Marrok, but it didn't turn out to be as simple as that. His contacts with the fae turned out to be unable to help, the fairy queen having gone rogue enough they claimed they couldn't trace her, either. Now that both he and Ariana had failed, they had to accept they'd be getting no help from that quarter. So it was back to werewolf methods and, he'd said, he had a few tricks left up his sleeve.

The problem was that he couldn't find her, either. Oh, she was in the pack bonds, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. That happened sometimes when people died, the lingering, although maybe not for this long. Of course, it could mean everything. Mercy's connection to the pack had been a little bit—weird, so far anyway. And when Samuel had told his father the fairy queen had a witch working with her, the Marrok had _snarled_ , and most of the werewolves present had almost pissed themselves. Then he'd said very calmly, "Oh, yes, that would explain it. She's cut the mate bond and is blocking us with black magic. It's easily mended—once we find her, of course."

Half the pack held that the incident just proved that the rumors about how much the Marrok hated witches were true, and there was no doubting that the Marrok hated witches, but Ben held that half the pack were idiots.

The secondary problem was that even if the Marrok could find her, he couldn't _hear_ her. The frustration in Bran Cornick's voice when he'd admitted that was the single best argument Ben had ever heard that he wasn't bluffing, the telepathy thing really only went one way. In other contexts, he might have found it reassuring, but now it really, really wasn't. Then again, that could've just been because she was a coyote and not a wolf, too. Who the hell knew? Every time Ben felt like he was getting a grasp on the rules, they changed on him, although he supposed that at least in Washington, it was because the situations they found themselves in kept getting crazier, and not because, as it had been in London, someone literally kept changing the rules.

The Marrok had been there for several days when Ben was finally given the chance to speak to him. Ben had been busy, his days having condensed down to eat, go to his day job so he didn't get fired, search for a sign of Mercy or the fairy queen's lair, sleep, do it all again.

And then one afternoon, Darryl sent Ben down to the basement, which the Marrok had more or less taken over, to interrupt his meditation or whatever the fuck he was trying to do and tell him that lunch was happening soon. Ben watched him stir as he came down the last few stairs into the basement, the frustrated crease between his brows smoothing out until he looked like a pizza delivery boy again and not the most powerful werewolf in the world. The second time Ben had ever seen him, the first time he'd really looked at him and been lucid, he'd felt like he'd had to rearrange his brain a little bit to wrap it around the idea of that much power in that unassuming a package. "Sir?" he said, careful of his respect for this wolf of all wolves. "Darryl says lunch is almost ready."

"Ah, Ben," Bran Cornick said. "Thank you. Is it as good as it smells?"

"Better, sir. Darryl has kitchen powers." He sounded ridiculous, he thought savagely, and almost retreated back up the stairs, but he wasn't going to get a better chance, was he? "I wanted to thank you, sir."

"For what?" Bran Cornick asked, confused.

"For giving me a chance."

"Oh, well. That was Adam, as much as anything."

Sure, it was. If Bran Cornick hadn't made up his mind Ben was worth saving in the first place, Adam Hauptman would have never known he had ever lived. "Can I ask you a question?" he asked, and Bran Cornick just looked calmly at him, waiting. "Why _did_ you give me a chance?"

"May I ask you a question?" he threw back at him. "Are we monsters?" The boy and the wolf inside Ben froze, looking for the way out of the trap such a question had to be; the man was just lost. "It's not a trick question, Ben," the Marrok said gently. "I'm interested to hear your answer." But he still didn't know how to reply, and after a moment the Marrok tossed him a line. "Some would say the wolf makes us monsters."

"The wolf doesn't make us monsters," Ben said, almost talking over him in his haste, his absolute certainty of that much, at least. "The wolf can be a monster. I've heard that men who are lost to their wolves are. Well. I guess except for Samuel. But people are monsters. The wolf just makes a handy excuse, for some."

And Bran Cornick smiled at him and said, "That's why."

Ben didn't understand at all.

"My mate put it a different way—ah, I see you've heard about her," he said, and Ben frantically wondered what was on his face. "Well, everything Mercy has to say about Leah is true, I'm sorry to say, but you and I know well enough that one person's experience of you is rarely the whole story. Anyway, Leah put it like this: you went out and you bought a knife."

"I didn't use it, though," Ben protested.

"But you did."

"It took me way too long to use it," he amended.

"You've got to stop moving the goalposts," Bran chided him. "Not being able to break an order, even a bad one, until the man who gave it was dead was no fault of yours. The magic that makes us can be a cruel thing in its inflexibility." Ben didn't know what to say to that. He didn't even know where to begin. "Well. Tell Adam and Darryl I'll be up in a few minutes."

"Yes, sir."

"You can call me Bran, you know," the Marrok called after him, and Ben thought that he really couldn't.

And then a few minutes later, Darryl turned away from the stove and, halfway between it and the island, dropped the pan he was holding, then strode right through the mess unheeding and started up the stairs, only to meet Auriele halfway down in the same state as him. They were all still trying to work out what the hell had just happened when Bran Cornick came up the stairs from the basement, carrying that fae walking stick that followed Mercy around and looking tired and pleased.

"I've done the hard part, Alpha," he told Adam. "Now tell us where your mate is."

They never did get lunch, but they got Mercy back, which was considerably better even than Darryl's cooking.

***

It was more than a year after that, after she'd picked him up from Mel Dreyer's house in wolf form, before Mercy got around to asking him the question Ben knew she'd been mulling over for a while. He'd spent the night at her and Adam's house, regained his humanity, and she'd been taking him to pick up his car so he could go to work and sort out the absolute chaos he'd just—not created, but definitely contributed to, not least of which was that the wolf was out of the bag—when she asked, suddenly, "What happened in London?"

Ben blinked. That hadn't...exactly been what he'd expected. He'd known she was chewing something over, but not that she didn't know the answer to that one. "I don't know," he began tentatively, "what you were told." That had been a long time ago.

"You were wanted or under suspicion or something for a series of rapes."

"Accessory. They had the rapist, or his corpse, anyway. And good riddance." If there was one thing he'd ever done in his life he was not sorry about at all, it was cutting Terry's fucking throat. "The sick freak who stood in the corner while he beat women to a pulp and then forced himself on them, and didn't do a da—darned thing, that was the one they were still looking for. That was me."

Mercy considered that for a mile or two, and then she asked, "Why?"

The fuck kind of question was that, Ben thought. Why should she give him the benefit of the doubt? Even now? But there was only one answer that was true, and he knew well enough that she would hear any lie he thought to tell. So he told her, "Alpha's orders."

"Oh," Mercy said. "Oh, Ben, I'm so sorry."

"Not every pack is like this one," Ben told her. "And Arthur Madden was not like the Marrok." He remembered the shock when someone had told him Madden had died, and almost more than that, that he really had believed himself King Arthur reborn to the last. Even though werewolves couldn't lie to each other, everyone he'd heard talk about it in England had been quite certain it had just been Madden's way of one-upping Bran Cornick. "Here is better," he told her. "Sh—silly town." Mercy huffed a soft little laugh. "Towns. Cities."

"Metropolitan area."

"That. Yes. But it's better." Adam would never try to make him do anything like that. Darryl and Warren could never be Terry. And if one of them went mad, as Terry had surely been mad, the rest of the pack would put them down. Simple as that. "I'm glad I'm here." He wanted to tell her that he'd killed him, but that wasn't the most important part.  Not really. 

It turned out that old maxim about home being where when you had to go there they had to take you in was true, even when applied to a place you'd never heard of and people you'd never met before you were summarily shipped there as an absolute last resort.

Mercy just asked, "Are you still trying not to swear?"

"I'm going to win that scotch."

"You know you can't get drunk."

"No, but it still tastes good."

Mercy scrunched up her nose. "I never got the taste for it." Then she said. "Hey, Ben. We're glad you're here, too." And one of the nice things about being a werewolf was knowing that she meant it.

**Author's Note:**

> Events in this story take place before _Moon Called_ and during _Blood Bound_ , _Silver Borne_ , and the short story "Redemption." 
> 
> This story does not contain onscreen rape or violence, but it does contain several references to Ben's backstory, which includes rape and violence against women committed by another character.


End file.
